Zurn Elkay Water Solutions Corp
F:4RX0
If you don’t study any companies, you have the same success buying stocks as you do in a poker game if you bet without looking at your cards.
Utilize notes to systematically review your investment decisions. By reflecting on past outcomes, you can discern effective strategies and identify those that underperformed. This continuous feedback loop enables you to adapt and refine your approach, optimizing for future success.
Each note serves as a learning point, offering insights into your decision-making processes. Over time, you'll accumulate a personalized database of knowledge, enhancing your ability to make informed decisions quickly and effectively.
With a comprehensive record of your investment history at your fingertips, you can compare current opportunities against past experiences. This not only bolsters your confidence but also ensures that each decision is grounded in a well-documented rationale.
Do you really want to delete this note?
This action cannot be undone.
| 52 Week Range |
25
38
|
| Price Target |
|
We'll email you a reminder when the closing price reaches EUR.
Choose the stock you wish to monitor with a price alert.
This alert will be permanently deleted.
Zurn Elkay Water Solutions Corp
You don't have any saved screeners yet
Good morning, and welcome to the Rexnord First Quarter Fiscal 2019 Earnings Results Conference Call with Todd Adams, President and Chief Executive Officer; Mark Peterson, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Rob McCarthy, Vice President of Investor Relations for Rexnord.
This call is being recorded and will be available on replay for a period of 2 weeks. The phone numbers for the replay can be found in the earnings release the company filed in an 8-K with the SEC yesterday, July 30.
At this time, for opening remarks and introduction, I'll turn the call over to Rob McCarthy.
Thank you, Paulette. Good morning, and welcome, everyone. Before we get started, I need to remind you that this call contains certain forward-looking statements that are subject to the safe harbor language contained in the press release that we issued yesterday afternoon as well as in our filings with the SEC.
In addition, some comparisons will refer to non-GAAP measures. Our earnings release and SEC filings contain additional information about these non-GAAP measures, why we use them and why we believe they're helpful to investors and contain reconciliations to the corresponding GAAP data. Consistent with prior quarters, we will speak to core growth, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted earnings per share and free cash flow as we feel these non-GAAP metrics provide a better understanding of our operating results. However, these measures are not a substitute for GAAP data, and we urge you to review the GAAP information in our earnings release and in our filings with the SEC.
Please note that the presentation of our operating results is now focused on our continuing operations as our VAG operations are now being reported as discontinued.
Today's call will provide an update on our strategic execution, our overall core performance for the first quarter of our fiscal 2019 and our outlook for fiscal year 2019. We'll cover some specifics on our 2 platforms followed by selected highlights from our financial statements. And afterwards, we'll open up the call to your questions.
So with that, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Todd Adams, President and CEO of Rexnord.
Thanks, Rob, and good morning, everyone. As you, hopefully, saw on our
[Audio Gap]
our first quarter results represented a solid start for what we expect will be a strong year for Rexnord, with core growth accelerating over the prior year, double-digit adjusted EBITDA growth and, by the end of the year, a year of record free cash flow. We're seeing steady growth in most of our served end markets and, more importantly, our organic initiatives around innovation, cost reduction and commercial excellence are beginning to deliver real benefits, with more to come.
Our updated outlook for fiscal year '19 continues to cover our continuing operations only and includes an unchanged outlook for mid-single-digit core growth, with acquisitions on top of that, but we've increased our expectations for our adjusted EBITDA, which we now project to be in the range of $425 million to $440 million. VAG's operations are now recorded as discontinued, and the divestiture process is well advanced at this point, and we anticipate an announcement during our second quarter.
Looking more closely our first quarter results, sales of $504 million included core growth of 4%, and we're up 14% on a reported basis and generally in line with our expectations for the quarter. Core growth in our Water Management platform, which is now comprised solely of our Zurn business, was sustained at 7% year-over-year. We delivered 3% core growth in our PMC platform and expect PMC's first half core growth to finish in the mid-single-digit range as we see growth accelerating in our second quarter. We were able to leverage a solid growth in both platforms and a 23% year-over-year growth in our overall adjusted EBITDA, which increased to $105 million, with strong incremental margins in both platforms.
Adjusted EPS was $0.41 for the quarter and was up 41% over the comparable prior year period. Mark will review both the consolidated results and the performance of each platform as part of his comments a little later in the call.
Please turn to Slide 3. Looking at our operating platforms, our PMC platform had a strong quarter, with order and revenue growth across most of our end markets, additional backlog growth and some further acceleration in sell-through of our products in our distribution channels. We continued to aggressively work our direction digital strategy, and the growing customer feedback continues to validate our practical and significantly differentiated approach to the industrial Internet of Things.
We're continuing to invest behind our first-mover advantage, and we are on track with our plans to accelerate the introduction of additional categories of products that can easily be connected into a customer's existing control system and thereby immediately enhance the customer's process reliability and productivity with minimal incremental investment. We're also leveraging our direction platform to begin to retrofit our install base with IIoT capabilities, which offers customers immediate productivity with a very small investment, and the reception of several of our launch customers has been incredible. We'll be demonstrating our direction platform from the customers' perspective during one of the rotating breakout sessions at our upcoming Investor Day later this week.
PMC's margins were slightly better than expected as prior SCOFR actions, coupled with our aggressive approach to managing rising input costs, enabled adjusted EBITDA margin to improve by 180 basis points year-over-year to 21.5%. PMC incremental margins were 33% on an as-reported basis, which include Centa, but were above 60% on a core basis.
Centa, which we acquired in February, completed its first full quarter as part of Rexnord and is off to a terrific start. Order rates in backlog have grown each month as we've owned the business, and we're leveraging the Rexnord Business System both operationally and commercially to drive the process improvements we targeted.
[Audio Gap]
process continues, our confidence in capturing a sizable margin expansion opportunity we've identified as part of the acquisition has only increased.
Results in our Water Management platform were solid, with first quarter core growth in Zurn sustained at 7% level achieved in the prior quarter, as contributions from our innovation pipeline continued to contribute to above market growth. We see plenty of support for the solid growth we're projecting over the course of the year, particularly within institutional verticals. And we continue to invest in core products and adjacency innovation, and our digital initiatives continued to accelerate within Zurn.
Before I move on to the next slide, hopefully, many of you recall we modified both our approach and the elements of our external financial guidance at the start of last fiscal year, focusing on core growth, adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow, all on an annual basis and then updating any changes to those elements as we report earnings throughout the year. Our objective is to provide what we hope investors appreciate, projections that are meant to be durable across a range of scenarios over the course of the fiscal year.
We would normally be hesitant to revise our fiscal year outlook after just one quarter. With a robust start for this year and the good traction we're getting with our initiatives to fully offset input cost inflation, makes the low end of our previous guide range look just a little bit too conservative to us, and we're slightly increasing our outlook for adjusted EBITDA to the range of $425 million to $440 million.
Like everyone else, as best we can, we're closely monitoring the import of the tariff situation and resulting uncertainties creating for our customers. We've got a lot of conviction that our business can weather and thrive with the past, present and future organic initiatives we control. But in general, we think the tariff situation is not particularly helpful to our customers over time.
With that, please turn to Slide 4. As we announced last quarter, we plan to focus and prioritize our Water Management platform around our Zurn operations that provide enhanced water quality, safety, flow control and conservation in primarily North American nonresidential building applications. One effect of reporting our VAG business that serves global water and wastewater infrastructure markets within discontinued operations, is that investors now get a clearer view of our consolidated results across the balance of Rexnord. As shown by the charts, removing VAG from our continuing operating results from our fiscal '18 last year, in other words, reveals as a much stronger overall operating metrics for the balance of Rexnord and are a much surer reflection of the core strength and differentiated profile of Rexnord. For example, our consolidated fiscal year '18 gross margin was 160 basis points higher than was originally reported a year ago, while VAG was still included in our continuing operations. Our days sales and receivables are lower by 4 days, and our return metrics are several points higher and headed higher this year and next as we complete our second wave of structural cost-reduction initiatives.
Turning to Slide 5. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to highlight the progress we've made in leveraging the Rexnord Business System to build a culture of winning and continuous improvement in our new bearings operations in Monterrey, Mexico and McAllen, Texas. Just for perspective, in a little over 3 years, we've transitioned our 2 bearing businesses out of 2 existing facilities, started 2 true greenfield operations thousands of miles away while hiring over 500 new people. And this quarter, we set all-time records for shipments, reduced our past few backlogs to its lowest level ever, and all of this comes within just 6 months of -- after completing the transition. The success we've seen to date can be traced to the teams in Texas and Mexico buying in and leveraging the Rexnord Business System and building a strong culture of continuous improvement.
Just this quarter, we ran a series of Kaizen events to drive a step change in capacity to free up additional floor space. What's so powerful about what we're doing is that not only the teams do start up, absorb what was an incredibly complex phased move of a facility amidst an accelerated demand, but shortly thereafter, it started to immediately eliminate waste in critical value streams with terrific results. Work-in-process inventories were mostly eliminated by the conversion to 1-piece flow. Production rates jumped significantly, set-up times were collapsed in 2 critical functions and revising the layout in 1 area enabled the teams to condense [indiscernible] by more than 20%. The combined annualized savings of the week's activities approaches $800,000 and demonstrates the power of continuous improvement, associated engagement and drives real value for shareholders. And I hope it highlights the compounding effects that RBS drives, even in an already high-performing location.
With that, I'll turn the call over to Mark.
Thanks, Todd. Please turn to Slide #6. On a consolidated basis, our first quarter of fiscal '19 financial results were slightly ahead of our expectations. On a year-over-year basis, our total sales grew 14%, our core sales increased 4%, and our adjusted EBITDA increased by 23% to $105 million, and our adjusted earnings per share increased by 41% to $0.41.
Moving to Slide #7. Our outlook for our fiscal '19 continues to incorporate mid-single-digit core sales growth, but as Todd discussed, we've slightly increased our outlook for adjusted EBITDA to a range from $425 million to $440 million, or 10% to 14% year-over-year growth for our continuing operations, and we expect to build another year of free cash flow ahead of net income.
Turning to Slide 8. We summarize our consolidated results for the quarter.
Let's move on to Slide 9 to discuss the first of our 2 platforms, Process & Motion Control.
Total sales increased 16% year-over-year at PMC, with core sales growth of 3% in the first quarter, and it was 5% outside of our aerospace end market and came on top of PMC's 5% core growth in the year earlier quarter. Currency translation added 2%, and the acquisition of Centa added 11% to our sales growth in its first full quarter since the acquisition.
PMC experienced solid growth in its process industry in consumer facing end markets during the quarter, and we saw some acceleration within sell-through in our North American industrial distribution channel. Our sales to aerospace customers were temporarily down year-over-year in the quarter as certain shipments we expected to make in our first quarter will ship in our second quarter. As a result, we expect core growth for our aerospace operations to strengthen significantly in our second quarter and contribute to PMC delivering solidly mid-single-digit core growth in the first half of our fiscal year.
In the top right corner of the slide, you can see the unchanged end-market assumptions that support our outlook for mid-single-digit core sales growth of PMC that is incorporated into our fiscal '19 guidance. Our fiscal '19 outlook continues to assume positive growth across PMC's primary end markets in the process, consumer and aerospace sectors and in our distribution channels.
PMC's EBITDA and margin are slightly ahead of our expectations, as adjusted EBITDA increased 26% year-over-year and margin improved year-over-year by 180 basis points to 21.5%. PMC benefited from strong operational execution, pricing was positive, and we were successful in managing the growing impact of materials cost inflation in the quarter. The structural benefits in the first leg of our supply chain optimization and footprint repositioning initiatives that were completed in last year's second quarter were also fully reflected in PMC's first quarter results, as the incremental EBITDA margin, excluding the Centa acquisition, was over 50% in our first quarter.
We continue to expect PMC to deliver margin expansion for the full year, and we expect to see another quarter of strong year-over-year margin expansion in our second quarter. And we finished annualizing the structural savings from the first [indiscernible] SCOFR actions that were completed in last year's second quarter.
I'll have more to say about our ability to manage an inflationary environment in just a few minutes. For this quarter, I'd like to highlight another significant innovation from Rexnord
[Audio Gap]
run-dry modular conveying chain. Dry-PT is designed to maintain a low level of friction between the conveying chain and the bottle, run without lubrication and perform at a high level under stress. Dry-PT is designed to reduce or limit water consumption, and it's designed specifically to optimize high-speed PET bottling applications. Launched first in Europe and now in North America, Dry-PT has earned strong acceptance from customers by demonstrating its ability to reliably reduce lubrication requirements and related water consumption without sacrificing reliability and durability. We expect to gain a greater share of the available market as a result.
With that, I'll turn to Slide 10 to discuss our Water Management platform. During our first quarter, our Water Management platform delivered 10% net sales increase that was a function of 7% year-over-year core sales growth and a 3% contribution from World Dryer. Top line results were in line with our expectations as certain growth continues to benefit from several important product launches that occurred over the last year, including the EZ1 drain system and the Sundara line of solid-surface fixtures.
Today, I'd like to highlight our recent launch for new design tool for plumbing specifiers, Zurn's proprietary inSpec digital specification tool. inSpec has been designed with several new features and capabilities that can meaningfully improve the plumbing design, engineer's productivity, including easier project management, easier design calibration and easier submittal construction. We are garnering terrific feedback with belief -- we are garnering terrific feedback and believe that inSpec can help drive incremental growth over time. As illustrated by our unchanged underlying end-market outlook that is summarized in the slide, we remain confident that Zurn can deliver mid-single-digit core growth in what continues to be a solid U.S. nonresidential construction market.
Forward indicators activity like the Dodge Momentum and ABI design indexes and U.S. construction employment continue to signal growth, and our results demonstrate that the contractors remain very busy. Given solid fundamental demand growth and the ongoing curtailment in our investment in innovation, we expect a somewhat easier comparison in our second quarter to contribute to relatively stronger year-over-year core growth from Water Management in our second quarter.
Water Management's EBITDA margin increased over 100 basis points year-over-year, as the benefits from strong volume growth during the quarter were leveraged with solid execution on our cost inflation countermeasures to deliver 15% year-over-year EBITDA growth. We remain confident in Zurn's ability to manage rising materials costs through a combination of materials cost actions, supply chain management and flexible price increases, and we continue to expect our Water Management platform to deliver year-over-year margin expansion in our fiscal '19.
Second quarter margins are expected to expand sequentially but are likely to be down year-over-year, and it's unusually difficult comparison from a year ago that was influenced by the cadence of certain investment spending and favorable product and project mix.
That's a good lead into the next slide, Slide 11. We understand that investors are closely monitoring the potentially adverse impact of tariffs and higher costs of raw materials and freight transportation more broadly. And our objective continues to be to fully offset the impact of inflation on our margins. We are working several strategies to manage in the current environment. We believe that our basic business model in both platforms supports our efforts. Our products tend to be a relatively small portion in the customers' investments that have not had an impact on system productivity and reliability. So you compete on that basis, on the superior productivity and reliability that our brand represents.
We also have the flexibility to react quickly with flexible pricing actions in our distribution channels that become necessary when we cannot fully offset cost inflation with supply chain management, engineered solutions and incremental productivity initiatives. The impact is also mitigated by a steady transition over time with so-called DPAT model, or design, procure, assemble, test, and away from the historical model of highly and vertically integrated manufacturing. For example, we exited multiple foundries as part of SCOFR 1, which reduces our fixed costs and affords us greater control over more flexible cost structure.
Besides aggressively working our global supply chain, we're looking at alternative materials where possible, and our established value-add, value engineering program has a funnel of product redesigns and reengineering initiatives that we're leveraging to identify incremental cost savings opportunities. To date, price realization has developed favorably, and our team is executing well on our funnel of materials cost reduction initiatives. We maintain a favorable price-cost gap in our first quarter, and our objective continues to be to at least neutralize any impact on our EBITDA margins in a new platform for the fiscal year.
Moving on to Slide 12. You can see in the chart at the top left that our financial leverage as measured by our net leverage ratio was 2.7x. Free cash flow was typically lighter in the first half and is developing consistent with our expectations to deliver at least $200 million of free cash flow for the full year. Given our expectations for free cash flow to expand in fiscal '19 and given our strong overall liquidity, we believe we have ample resources to continue to execute our bolt-on acquisition strategy while maintaining a leverage ratio in a range between 2 and 3x.
Before we open the call up for questions, I'd like to comment on the accounting for VAG and then speak to restructuring expenses and our effective tax rate before we take your questions.
First, as we have highlighted, VAG financial results are being reported as discontinued operations. The related assets and liabilities have been classified as held-for-sale. We have recorded, through discontinued operations, a $44 million write-down on the intangible assets in the quarter. I'd also like to point out that
[Audio Gap]
in our press release includes revenue and adjusted EBITDA for continuing operations of our water platform for the 4 quarters of last year to assist in your financial modeling and analysis.
Second, and in terms of our cost-reduction initiatives, we continue to project total restructuring expenses of $11 million to $13 million in our
[Audio Gap]
These costs are primarily made up of severance costs and are excluded from our adjusted operating results. Next, our effective tax rate will fluctuate by quarter given the growing level of pretax income as well as the timing of other planning initiatives. We anticipate our fiscal '19 adjusted net income will incorporate an effective tax rate of approximately 29%, which is unchanged from last quarter. For the second quarter, we anticipate a rate of 29% to 30%.
Turning to slides in the appendix. First, we've included certain other assumptions incorporated into our guidance for fiscal '19 on a separate slide.
I need to remind you that our guidance only covers the continuing operations. And in addition, our guidance excludes the impact of potential acquisitions, potential accounting gains or losses and future nonrecurring items, such as restructuring costs. As has been our practice, the appendix to today's presentation also includes the reference tables to help you determine the appropriate incremental quarterly share count to use for modeling our adjusted diluted earnings per share under the if-converted method if it is applicable. As illustrated on Slide 19, the if-converted method was slightly less than $0.01 diluted for adjusted EPS in the first quarter and, therefore, applies even though our adjusted EPS is $0.41 with either method. Lastly, we included several pretax and aftertax impacts of each adjustment in our calculation of adjusted net income plus the reconciliation table related to adjusted EBITDA and adjusted earnings per share that are included in our earnings release each quarter.
With that, we'll open the call up for questions.
[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Jeff Hammond from KeyBanc Capital Markets.
So looks like relative to normal seasonality, strong start to the year and 2Q seems to be shaping up well, can you just talk about how you're thinking about the second half in terms of tough comps or any slowing just within the guidance?
Yes, Jeff, it's Todd. Embedded in the guidance, really, is mid-single-digit core growth over the course of the year. We expect to be there for the first half and the second half as well. And so I'm not particularly worried about tough comps as we go through the year. We think the momentum in both platforms is strong. The reality is most of the pricing actions that Mark talked about in his comments, really, sort of benefit the second half. And so with steady end-market demand, the price impact, we expect to see solid core growth over the course of the year.
Okay. Can you give a little more color on what you're doing on price kind of order magnitude and where you're putting price through most aggressively?
Yes, obviously, we're not going to comment on discrete price increases other than to say, with being the market leader, we have the ability to gain price, as Mark talked about in his comments. And I think we're taking advantage of being a leader, but doing it smartly and trying to stay in front of what we see as potential cost inflation throughout the year. So we're -- we'll see that play out over the second half. But suffice it to say that we have the ability to pass on price, we've been doing it, and we'll continue to do it selectively and smartly. But it should be, at worse, margin-neutral as we go through the year.
Okay. And then just one quick one on water. Margins looked particularly strong there and, I guess, it's hard to kind of see, with the VAG pullout, what -- maybe just talk about how you saw those versus your expectations, any positive surprises there.
You bet. In our release, we do a little bit of a reconciliation, so you can actually see the margins over time. And so the Zurn business has solidly been in the mid-20s as we worked it up over the years. And so from a quarter perspective, the margins weren't a surprise to us, and we continue to see opportunities to improve the margin profile of the business going forward, with the things we've done with SCOFR, continued focus on RBS and likely a SCOFR 2 and potentially a SCOFR 3 down the road, so strong margins that should continue to go higher.
Our next question comes from Mig Dobre from RW Baird.
Maybe to go back to this question on margin in Water Management. Asked differently, when I'm looking at this 35% incremental EBITDA margin, this is quite good. And again, I am wondering whether or not there were some -- anything that was special about this quarter or if we should sort of range our expectations going forward in this area, this 35% area, especially since you're talking about incremental price increases and things like that down the line.
Mig, we'd, obviously, not like you to change your expectations too much, but the profit in the business in the quarter and, really, last year benefited from no onetime or unusual items. As we go through and we've been talking about for a while, the mix towards institutional offers us -- it's a higher-margin mix for us just based on the content that would go into buildings and the products that -- the margins we make on those products. So fundamentally, the margins and the incrementals are tracking to what we'd expect given the projects and the mix, but that's just sort of the way the business has performed for a while. So we're optimistic that with the price increases and, again, with further cost reductions and leveraging RBS, we have the ability to continue to generate strong incrementals over the course of the year and in the future.
Okay. So basically, steady as she goes from here with this kind of performance, that's kind of what you're saying. You also talked about new product introductions and that's something that we've heard in the past within this segment. Maybe a little more color here and help us understand if these new product introductions -- well, first, the magnitude and then, are these accretive to margin? Is that also part of the story?
They are. We want to share a number of products, really, over the course of the last year and into this year that all have a favorable margin profile relative to some of the legacy products. At the same time, the legacy products are also highly profitable. And I don't know that we're going to get into the magnitude of the product launches, but they've clearly grown well above the market, sort of in line with our expectations, primarily based upon to deliver -- the value that they deliver to customers. If you think about reducing build costs, accelerating the build cycle, these are products that play right into what end users and contractors want, which is to reduce labor costs and overall build costs as they build buildings.
Okay. I want to switch to maybe asking you a question about the overall guidance. You raised the low end of EBITDA. Obviously, there's still a range out there. You sound confident overall, but I'm wondering what are the puts and takes, the low end versus the high end? I don't know if this is a range of growth that you have in mind, really, for the full year or if it's mixed or if there are other cost elements here that might not necessarily be obvious from the outside. Any help would be appreciated.
Yes. I think what you see, Mig, is we've got a mid-single-digit expectation for growth and that translates to what we think is a range of EBITDA, $425 million to $440 million. And so to the degree we migrate towards the higher end of mid-single digits, I'd suspect you'd see the EBITDA range towards the higher end of that. Obviously, we're also working cost levers, productivity and price increases. And so I don't want to say it's linear, but we see good growth over the course of the year, and I think we're comfortable that the earnings range that we've got, we hope, turns out to be something that we land in or potentially towards the high end, and that's really -- that's the way to interpret it. I don't think there's much science -- there's a lot of science behind it, but it's more art. We're trying to manage the business smartly over time. And with 9 months left in our fiscal year, we're just trying to give you our best look at what we think the range of outcomes is. But clearly, after the good start, we felt like it was prudent to pick the bottom end of the prior range up a little bit.
Sure. But if I understand this correct, you were saying that it's a function of top line variation, maybe a little stronger, maybe a little bit weaker around that mid-single-digit range. It's not something within the margins specifically that generate low end versus high end of EBITDA.
Obviously, that -- I think -- correct, but that being said, if mid-single digit, as we interpreted, is 4 to 6%, we wouldn't be comfortable telling you that 5% is the midpoint of the range because we do other things to try to drive the earnings higher with cost reductions and other productivity. So it's not linear per se, but it is sort of our best shot that what we think the range of outcomes looks like from here, assuming margins are relatively consistent with where they've been and where they're tracking.
Got it. That's helpful. Lastly for me. Within the quarter, you had a second leadership change in Water Management. Maybe tell us a little bit about that if you can and whether or not that involves any other changes within the business.
I don't think we're going to spend a lot of time commenting on it, Mig, other than to say we've made some strategic decisions with respect to the portfolio as well as decisions around the org structure to drive what we think is the most effective growth in profit we can. And so as a result of that, we made a change. We're very comfortable with the change we made. And as you can see, the business is performing quite well, and we expect it to continue to perform quite well. And so like anything else, the structure of the organization needs to match the strategy and the execution, and we're optimistic that you'll see that continue probably over the course of the year.
Our next question comes from Julian Mitchell from Barclays.
Maybe just a first question on the free cash flow. It was down quite a bunch year-on-year because of, I guess, inventories and accruals. Wondered if that was simply a function of the top line outlook, for example, one of your -- or another industrial company today talked about how they were prebuying inventory because of tariffs. So I wondered if there was any of that in your free cash or it was simply because the orders and top line look so good.
I'll give you sort of the view that we have, which is, for the year, we expect free cash flow to exceed net income, which is going for $200 million-ish. Obviously, last year, there was a bit of an anomaly in the way the first quarter cash flow rolled out. It was seasonally stronger due to the timing of a few things. This year, those things sort of normalized, and we did do some buy-aheads for inventory in advance of the tariffs, but also to reflect the strength of the top line that we're seeing in Zurn. So if you think about the Zurn business, the seasonal quarters -- the seasonal high quarters are the June and September quarters based on the nonresidential construction cycle in North America. And so with that strength with tariffs and the unusual nature of last year, you sort of get to the root of your question. All that being said, over the course of the year, we still expect the $200 million of free cash flow to be there by the end.
And then my second question. Amidst what is clearly a very good top line environment, you still have a couple of sort of yellow or amber lights in the traffic light scheme you have on end-market outlook. Maybe just touch on those 2 because everything else is so good. So just what are you seeing in sort of European industrial distribution? And then has your view changed on the nonres North America construction market?
Yes, I think, overall, our views are unchanged over the course of the quarter. And so I think we're just taking a cautious outlook on Europe with industrial distribution. It's not a big piece of our business, to be honest, but it's something we're watching. And we're still -- we still see plenty of support for solid growth. Backlogs are in good shape. Our spec rates and our win rates are very high, and we feel good about where nonres sits. Obviously, we've had a view that commercial and industrial nonres building was going to slow. I think that continues. It's not negative, but it's a slower growth end market, as institutional, education, health care, all those things really are quite strong. So unchanged for the quarter and the year and just something that we're going to keep an eye on those 2 areas.
Our next question comes from Charlie Brady from SunTrust Robinson Humphrey.
I was just going to kind of tail in on the end-market question in the water business on those end markets. Can you give us a little more sense of kind of what kind of growth you're seeing in those particular end markets, particularly the ones that are growing a little bit better, the institutional or the rotation you've seen there?
Sure. Obviously, institutional is growing at a higher rate than commercial. Commercial is still positive in the lower single-digit range, institutional above that, and then we're seeing pricing above that. So it'd be tough to really give you a sense of what we think the overall market is, but think about commercial is low single digits, think about institutional is mid-single digits plus some price. And that's where you get to the 7% for the quarter and last, and we think that as you go over the course of the year, it'll fluctuate a little bit. But we're optimistic that the second quarter for Zurn will also be very strong. So we're watching everything. We think that the markets are, frankly, quite strong, if you look at where backlogs sit, and that's probably as good as we're going to get, Charlie.
Yes. No, I appreciate that. And just on PMC, the commentary on the aerospace orders, the timing there. Can you give us a little more color on what's -- exactly what that entails, what's going on with that?
Yes. And it was a combination of some slight push-arounds, not outs, but push-arounds within the customer base that resulted in the supply chain sort of not being able to deliver in the quarter. And so the order of magnitude is between $4 million and $5 million. And we think that most of that, if not all of that, sort of falls into the second quarter, which puts us sort of whole for the first half. Order rates have been very good, and so we'd expect after this sort of shift between Q1 and Q2, the balance will appear to be pretty steady.
Great. And that kind of comment on the supply chain leads me to the next question. Are you seeing a pinch in the supply chain? Is your supply chain able to, given some of the strong growth you're seeing in these end markets, kind of keep pace with what you're seeing on your end?
I think the answer is generally yes. Obviously, as we've gone through the supply chain optimization over the last couple of years, we've done more with outside suppliers. The aerospace has nothing to do with that change. But so far, we've been pleased with the way the supply chain has been performing. It's really incumbent upon us to keep them up-to-date with the latest sales, inventory and operations planning because they need to take their cues and plan capacity around the cues that we give them. So giving them an accurate projection at what we're seeing on a go-forward basis makes them equally as effective in delivering to that. So it's not just a supply chain problem, it's really stuff that we can control by sending our suppliers the right cues and the right capacity going forward.
[Operator Instructions] And our next question comes from Joe O'Dea from Vertical Research.
Maybe just to confirm, it sounds like within the guide, the EBITDA expectations are for neutral price cost experience for the remainder of the year with respect to margin. And then related to that, when you take stock of the various inflationary pressures out there, have you announced the pricing for what you see and anticipate? Or do you expect that there will be incremental price actions in the remainder of the year in order to hit the guidance that you have?
Joe, this is Mark. Yes, your first comment was correct. If you look at -- over the course of the year, for us, the price-material cost equation doesn't adversely impact our margins. So that's one of the assumptions that we've had that I talked about in the call, [indiscernible] basically, over the course of the year and saw it, obviously, in our first quarter. [indiscernible] the pricing actions, the majority of our pricing actions are in place. We do not -- we, at this point in time, have a lot of things that need to be done from here. Now clearly, the situation is a little fluid as we all know. And one of the things about our business model that's powerful is our ability to react quickly. So it's been through change from here. We don't let any concerns of our ability to take additional pricing actions. But right now, the majority what we need to accomplish for the year, we've put in place at this point in time.
Got it. And then commentary around an acceleration in some of the sell-through and distribution. I think we went through kind of early stages of recovery and what looked like would have been kind of lighter inventory levels in distribution. As you see things accelerate, what does that mean in terms of a scenario where distributors are just understocked at this point and that in this year you could see, as we see accelerating demand, a better degree of confidence and a period of some restock and distribution?
Joe, it's Todd. To-date, we haven't seen any level of restocking. So all the end demand is being serviced by our ability to accelerate lead times. And while I think we'd be pleased with the level of restocking, we haven't seen it. And part of it is perhaps our own fault that we can continue to meet the end-market demand with improved lead times and delivery performance. So I think what that leads to is a very healthy level of inventory when you think about an overstock situation. There is no risk of an overstock situation given where inventory levels reside. So we're, like everybody else, complaining a little bit that the channel is a little thin. But at the same time, as long as we're able to meet the end demand and serve customers well, I think it bodes well for the way people think about us and, really, the future. So no restocking is embedded in the way we're thinking about the rest of the year per se. I mean, it certainly hasn't happened in the first quarter.
We're showing no further questions. I will now turn the call back to Rob McCarthy for closing remarks.
[Audio Gap]
on the call today. We appreciate your interest in Rexnord, and we hope to see you at our Investor Day on Thursday of this week. Please contact me if you'd like to attend. If you cannot attend, we will be webcasting the formal presentation portion of the day, and we hope you'll be able to view that -- or to see it later. We also look forward to providing our next update when we announce our fiscal year 2019 second quarter results in early November. Have a great day.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.